April 2002 3Digest - NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti Golden Sample 64 MBytes 4 ns

This chip is presented by Gainward GeForce2 Ti/500 XP Golden Sample 64 MBytes, AGP videocard.

Features:

NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti chip, 270 MHz clock rate;
64 MBytes DDR SDRAM memory in eight Hynix 4ns microchips, 250 (500) MHz clock rate in Turbo mode, 128-bit bus;
Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 1080 megapixels/sec and 2160 megatexels/sec.

GeForce2 GTS was released in the spring of the year 2000, causing the squall of criticism due to relatively slow 166 MHz DDR memory already used in GeForce256. The GPU itself was considerably improved (one more texture module per pipeline, increased 200 MHz clock rate), but the memory bandwidth was insufficient. The fall of the same year brought the improved version of GeForce2 GTS called GeForce2 Pro. It differed from its brother with the faster 200 MHz memory. Certainly, the 32-bit color perfomance was significantly improved, but still 200 (400) MHz was not enough to show the full potential.

But the development of GeForce2 line was abruptly stopped after the release of GeForce3 with the strong memory optimization and without such a high RAM bandwidth requirement. GeForce2 Pro was finished with the release of GeForce2 Ti, putting the end of GeForce2 family. These cards currently get cheaper and cheaper, already costing less than $100. Moreover, the release of GeForce4 MX is called to finish the remnants of GeForce2 off. However there is still such a huge amount of these cards - both GeForce2 Pro, and GeForce2 Ti. So they'll remain in the market for a long time. They either replace GeForce2 MX400 if their price drops, or die. And we think that even the fast solutions from Gainward can't help the situation.

Overclocks to 320/255 (510) MHz.

For the 10th of April 2002 the latest drivers from NVIDIA are 28.32 for Windows 9x/ME and 28.32, 28.35, 28.80 for Windows XP. As the drivers differences are equal for all GeForce2 GTS/Pro/Ultra/Ti cards, there's no sense in comparing drivers separately for each of these cards. See NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti 64 MBytes 5ns section for more information about drivers.

And now I want to attract your attention to another important 3D feature - filtering. As many of you know, all chipsets support bilinear filtering that is an important instrument in MIP-mapping, some chipsets support trilinear filtering (true, not the approximation) and only few support anisotropic filtering.

Due to the fact that GeForce2 and GeForce3 do support anisotropic filtering, I recommend you to pay attention to the article concerning this feature.

You can compare screenshots with reference ones (NVIDIA GeForce3).

Games / Cards	1	2	3	4	5	6
NVIDIA GeForce2
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	7	8	9	10	11	12
NVIDIA GeForce2
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	13	14	15	16	17	18
NVIDIA GeForce2						-
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	19	20	21	22	23	24
NVIDIA GeForce2		-		-
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	25	26	27	28	29	30
NVIDIA GeForce2
NVIDIA GeForce3

Game list:

1. Return to Castle Wolfenstein
2. Unreal2 - for GeForce cards, Unreal - for all other
3. Comanche4
4. No One Lives Forever
5. Serious Sam
6. Colin McRAE Rally2
7. American McGee's Alice
8. Mercedes Benz Truck Racing
9. Sacrifice
10. F.A.K.K. 2
11. Need For Speed V (Porshe 2000)
12. Real MYST
13. Blade of Darkness
14. Giants
15. 3DMark2001: Game1
16. 3DMark2001: Game2
17. 3DMark2001: Game3
18. 3DMark2001: Game4
19. 3DMark2001: Dot3
20. 3DMark2001: EMBM
21. 3DMark2001: Vertex Shaders
22. 3DMark2001: Pixel Shaders
23. Black & White
24. Undying
25. Command and Conquer: Renegade
26. Max Payne
27. AquaNox
28. Serious Sam II
29. IL2: Shturmovik
30. MoHAA

2D quality is very high. Soaping effects can be seen only on some low-quality monitors in 1600x1200x75-85 Hz. But there are some low-quality cards present that give soaping effect on good monitors at 1600x1200. And I shall mark that 6.* version drivers are not compatible with the software for sound cards based on Yamaha processor, as well as with SoftXG100 software synthesizer. Start or Close Window buttons can be spoiled by some "garbage" in 2D mode.